Can you hear the hearts beating as one?
Press Release
Aimée Zito Lema was born in The Netherlands, where her father, a lawyer and human rights activist, had gone into exile escaping the dictatorship in Argentina. In 1985 she returned with him to the family home, which houses a vast archive of press material and publications.
Through a disruptive take on the image, rephotographing and reprinting archive images from the military dictatorship in Argentina as well as other more intimate registers, Zito Lema explores intergenerational memory in an endeavour to keep it alive. For the artist, both groups of images—from the collective memory and culled from everyday life—give shape to one inextricable album. The point of departure for this exhibition is the original newspapers published during the Trial of the Juntas, held in Argentina in 1985 after the restoration of democracy, whose distinctive feature lies in the fact that they included the literal transcription of those hearings. After learning shorthand stenography and how to decode symbols, Zito Lema reconfigures these newspapers, drawing lines which she superimposes over the images. These drawings or new layers create a composition in which the space can be inhabited from the generational present.
In another set of images, we can see a digitized 16mm film in which mother and child play the piano together. Starting out from this video, the artist creates a series of analogue stills which she then digitally amplifies to a larger scale. In this sequence, during which the specific becomes abstract, Zito Lema proposes an approach to History where learning through the senses is crucial, engaging with affection as a form of conveying knowledge.
“Through a disruptive take on the image, rephotographing and reprinting archive images from the military dictatorship in Argentina as well as other more intimate registers, Zito Lema explores intergenerational memory in an endeavour to keep it alive where learning through the senses is crucial, engaging with affection as a form of conveying knowledge”.